Thread by @PhDniX

What is it with Classical Arabic/Qurʾānic Arabic textbooks and teaching people incorrect Arabic...
It seems like everyone has decided collectively it's better to lie about the details than actually teach it correctly.
So then you get the joy of unlearning all you learned wrong!

Of course there's also just the downright ignorant stuff about the Arabic script.

Why on earth write on the history of the script at all, if you're not going to reality check even a single thing you're saying! ARGH!

Moreover, a book that purports to be about "Quranic Arabic" but is actually specificlaly about the Arabic of the reading of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim is defensible, but at the very least you should *mention* that it is.

Only thing is that is is based on the "standard print". So what if someone picks up their printed Quran in Morocco? Or if they're in the Netherlands or France and are likely to pick up Warš as well? And suddenly a ton of what is in the book is wrong compared to their print.

All this being said. These are minor annoyances, but they are so pervasive that I'm not sure where one is to learn "proper" Classical/Quranic Arabic at all.

The book is otherwise quite good, has a nice structure, clearly laid out.

Ah yes, the Quranic Arabic adjective kufuwwun 'equal' known for... Sūrat al-ʾIḫlāṣ???

kufuwan is *not* the accusative of kufuwwun. It is the accusative of kufuʾun with dropped hamz. That's difficult to explain, but now students are left thinking gemination is optional.

And honestly, is kufuwwun even typically in use at all? As far as I know the typical form is kufūʾ, which *still* requires you to explain the dropping of the hamzah.

And like the form kufuww, kufūʾ is not Quranic.

No... in reality it *is* a single particle that evolved to have different uses -- just at is traditionally talked about. It's from *mah 'what?'

al-luʾluʾu اللؤلؤ, al-laʿnatu اللعنة, al-lāʿibīna اللعبين, al-laġwi اللغو, al-lamama اللمم, al-lahwi اللهو, al-lāṭīfu اللطيف, al-lahabi اللهب would like to have a word with you about that rule Dr. Jones.

A bit odd to cite al-jawārī as an example, since that form only occur in the Quran in its shortened form الجوار al-jawāri.

In general, no word at all on the shortened forms, which are rather frequent throughout the Quran. Is this a grammar of Classical or Quranic Arabic?!

Hey it's really neat that the Arabic uses the maddah sign in fī l-samāʾi, but Jones explicitly says he will not explain the maddah sign, and that he will use it only to write ʾā (which is not how it is used in the Quran). So now people are left reading it as as-samaʾāʾi...

yes ʾulū/ʾulī, which literally never occurs with final nūn+fatḥah is *definitely* the best way to show the process of dropping the nūn+fatḥah. </sarcasm>

(not also the non-quranic orthography اولو instead of Quranic اولوا).

Ah yes, bi-smi is only ever written without the ʾalif in the basmalah. That it is spelled بسم in Q11:41 just means that verse is a basmalah! (quran.com/11/41).

This is... not wrong. There are a couple of places where it is not written. But it seems like you're skipping over a rather essential point of Quranic orthography here, i.e. that the otiose ʾalif is written hundreds of times where it is NOT the 3 m.p. ending.

That is NOT the Hijazi mā. The Hijazi mā is only when the predicate is marked with the accusative. Which Jones does mention, but as a 'subset' of the Hijazi mā.

I appreciate him making a distinction between Quranic usage and classical usage here though.

with the perfect only, except of course when it is not. Like Q2:214; Q3:142; Q9:16; Q10:39; Q11:111; Q38:8; Q49:14; Q62:3; Q80:23

No doubt word-order is sometimes changed to accommodate the rhyme. But I'm not sure if this is a good example, nor that ʾantum muʾminūna bihī is the most natural way of saying it. The only phrase I could find with that 'natural' word-order in the Quran is ʾantum muġnūna ʿannā

Happy to see Jones discuss these forms. But where on earth does the declaration that they are Hijazi forms come from? Purely because it is Quran and therefore it must be Hijazi?

The grammarians certainly don't identify it this way. What's the point of introducing it like that?

Prepositional phrases may also be inserted in between if the subject of ʾanna is definite, or in construct. And as far as I can tell that's in fact more common than with the indefinite form.

Correct observation that the uncontracted form is more typical in the Quran. However the constracted form of yartadid occurs, and it is *not* vocalised yartaddi! It's yartadda (Q27:40). You only get i before hamzat al-waṣl: Q59:4 yušāqqi llāha